WebDevCon 2016

Amazon's Front-end Conference

April 21st 2016

WebDevCon 2016

WebDevCon is Amazon's front-end conference aimed at bringing together the community to discuss the latest trends and topics in our industry. We're a bunch of passionate folks who are excited to open our new 1500 seat conference center to the public, and welcome 11 speakers from companies around the country as well as 6 Amazon.com speakers. Registration and admission is free for everyone!

We've been running WebDevCon for 7 years internally and want to contribute back to the community, being able to share this with the public is something we have been working on for a long time.

J.C. Fant, Co-Founder WebDevCon

Speakers

Patrick Beer

Web Development Engineer, Amazon.com

“To Be Decided…”

I am an optimist, a technology enthusiast, a photography lover and a design admirer. As a German I respect rules but dislike them when they stop me from progressing. I enjoy concerts and art galleries. I value brilliant ideas and competency.

Brad Bouse

Co-Founder, Lightboard

Usefulness of Uselessness

Brad is the co-founder of Lightboard, providing design on-demand for hundreds of marketing departments across the country. He's also the founder of Code Fellows, and an early part of the frontend teams at Geni and Yammer. He's also pretty gosh-darned interested in the amazing things you can do with code when you're trying to make art.

John-David Dalton

Paul Duncan

Design Technologist, Amazon.com

The Art of KISSing

Paul was born and lives in London. He has a degree in Pure Physics which instilled a belief in simplicity.
He worked for the BBC which mainly consisted of building websites in muddy fields.
Currently he is a Design Technologist for Amazon Video in a world where we can watch movies on a phone and talk to a TV.

Alex Kotliarskyi

Software engineer, Facebook

Development experience with React Native

Alex has been working on React Native since its early days and is obsessed with development experience and tools. He teaches React Native classes internally at Facebook, and also likes to think about user interfaces and design.

Cynthia Mai

Software Development Engineer, Amazon.com

Front end development evolution at Amazon

Cynthia is a Software Engineer for Amazon based in the San Francisco office. As a member of the AmazonUI team, she has mainly worked on the build system for the AmazonUI framework, and she has recently been working on more front-end focused projects.

Tracy Osborn

Founder, WeddingLovely

Design for Non-Designers

Tracy Osborn is a designer, developer, and entreprenerd living in the Bay Area of California. She's the author of Hello Web App, teaching beginner web app development. Tracy graduated with a BFA in Art & Design with a concentration in Graphic Design from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and worked as a web designer for five years before teaching herself programming and launching her first startup, WeddingLovely. She's also an avid outdoorswoman and would love to go on a hike with you.

Clarissa Peterson

UX Analyst, ICE Health Systems

Responsive Color

Clarissa Peterson is a UX designer and web developer based in Calgary, Alberta. She frequently speaks and gives workshops on responsive design and user experience, as well as teaching in the web developer program at SAIT Polytechnic. Clarissa is the author of Learning Responsive Web Design: A Beginner's Guide (O'Reilly Media). Currently she works as a UX analyst at ICE Health Systems.

Bram Stein

Senior Computer Scientist, Adobe Typekit

Web Fonts Performance

Bram Stein is a web developer working on web font serving at Typekit. He cares a lot about typography and design on the web, and is happiest working at the intersection between design and technology. In his spare time he runs the stateofwebtype.com and maintains several tools for improving web typography. He writes about web typography for several magazines and is a contributing author to Smashing Book #5.

Paul Taylor

Engineer, Graphistry Inc.

Building Distributed RESTful JSON APIs with Falcor

Paul Taylor is a full-stack engineer with a bias for Functional Programming at Graphistry, Inc. in Oakland, CA. Prior to Graphistry, Paul led engineering of Netflix's front-end data access library Falcor, and architected version five of the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript for both Netflix's UI teams and Google’s Angular team, with a laser-focus on performance and developer friendliness.

Chris Tserng

Senior Software Engineer, Amazon.com/Lab126.com

Supercharged Hybrid Apps: Web Components + JS Interface

Chris Tserng is currently the technical lead and chief architect for Amazon WebView on FireOS. He has 19+ years of experience in software on embedded devices including work on computer vision, multimedia codecs, and computer graphics. In all these projects, he created frameworks in order to easily isolate the top-level developer from the intricacies of the software stack and hardware.

Betty Tso

Engineering Manager, Amazon.com

Front end development evolution at Amazon

Betty is the founding manager for AmazonUI engineering team, responsible for the front-end platform that is modernizing Amazon.com's FE codebase across mobile, tablet and desktop. It's an opportunity to enforce front-end best practices, make Amazon's retail sites lightning fast and encapsulate the minutia of cross device/browser compatibility. Betty speaks pixel perfectness, accessibility, security and is an evangelist in Web Performance Optimization domain. At Amazon, Betty gives tech talks during university recruiting events to help excite engineers who are passionate about lightning-fast large scale applications. Externally, Betty co-chairs Velocity Beijing conference and is on the program committee for Velocity Santa Clara, New York and Europe.

Estelle Weyl

Instart Logic, Open Web Evangelist

Simply accessible web performance

Estelle is a consulting web developer, trainer, author and speaker. She speaks and leads workshops on web development all over the world. Her books have been translated into over 14 languages. She's been coding CSS, HTML, and JavaScript since 1999.

Rachel White

Front End Developer, IBM Watson

Internet of Cats

Rachel is a self-taught Front End Engineer for IBM Watson, previously at Adobe Behance. She is currently developing a dating sim game, and thinking about node powered devices she can build for her two black cats. Her other interests include glitch art, 80s horror, and indie games.

Schedule

Room 02.101

Room 02.100

8:00

Registration

9:30

The Art of KISSing

Paul Duncan

“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.” — Dr. Seuss

The web is a hostile development environment with a plethora of devices and demanding users.
We know that delivering engaging experiences for everyone is complicated. Is Dr. Seuss right, are the answers simple?
Can a car manufacture help enlighten us? Should we code for no js or with node.js?
Let's explorer our world and see what lessons we can learn if we embrace simplicity and Keep It Simple Stupid.

Overflow for “The Art of KISSing”

10:30

Web Fonts Performance

Bram Stein

Web fonts are great. They are also be really bad for performance because they block rendering. You may have experienced this on a slow cellular network. Staring at a blank page is no fun, especially when content has already loaded.

This talk will explore why browser have placed fonts on the critical path, and how we can work around this while still delivering a good user experience. We'll also take a look at what the future will bring to web font performance: preloading hints and the new font-display property.

Responsive Color

Clarissa Peterson

Discover the secrets behind CSS color values, and how to adjust color attributes like saturation and brightness using Sass. Find out how user context, perception, and color blindness affect what people see, and what you can do to make the colors on your site more accessible. Learn why colors look different on different devices and how you can ensure your color choices make your site look good for all users and on any type or size of screen.

11:30

I Lodash

John-David Dalton

In this talk we'll deep dive into the internals of Lodash, covering several of the techniques used to improve performance, functional composition, and library customization.

Testing CSS

Hans Sprecher

Making changes in CSS is easy. Knowing if a change has unexpected side effects is devastatingly difficult. In large scale applications or environments where CSS handles nuanced interactions, having the ability to programmatically test new styles is a staple of client-side testing. Unfortunately, CSS testing remains underutilized.

This talk explores a variety of techniques that can be used to write unit and regression tests for CSS. These tools include image diff, DOM comparisons, and static analysis. At their best, stylesheets allow for rapid development by being finely tuned manifestations of style guides and interactivity patterns. Too often, they become the dumping grounds. By being able to remove and alter stylesheets with more confidence, developers can trend towards the former.

12:30

Lunch

1:30

Internet of Cats

Rachel White

Ever lose out on a good nights rest because your pesky cats keep waking you up at 4am for food?? Using node, socket.io, microcontrollers, and johnny-five, I built a web based feeder that can be set to a schedule or triggered remotely. I'll walk you through my learning process with utilizing new tech for the first time and get you excited about trying your own projects so you can take the first steps to putting your work out and contributing to the open source community.

Usefulness of Uselessness

Brad Bouse

Don't tell your boss, but I want you to make a useless art project–because it's actually pretty useful. Why? Committing to uselessness is a freeing experiment. As professionals, we tend to focus on the end result instead of the process, and that's not healthy. Embrace the creative process (iteration and experimentation) on a project and see where the path takes you.

“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work” — Chuck Close

2:00

Building Distributed RESTful JSON APIs with Falcor

Paul Taylor

Falcor is the open source JS data access library that powers Netflix. Falcor's Router enables you to represent your many distributed data sources and services as a unified virtual JSON model on the server, while the Falcor client provides the illusion this virtual JSON model is available locally. Through intelligent caching, optimized request patterns, and a reactive asynchronous API, Falcor efficiently and transparently keeps the server and client in sync.

Falcor is not a replacement for your MVC framework, your database, or your application server. Falcor fits seamlessly into your existing stack and lets the layers communicate more efficiently.

Get an inside look at the innovative data platform that powers the Netflix UIs, and learn how you can integrate Falcor into your existing stack.

Front end development evolution at Amazon

Cynthia Mai & Betty Tso

Few years ago, it took substantial effort across hundreds of teams to update the doctype across majority of amazon.com page views, due to Amazon's large scale (billions of page views per week) and distributed development community (thousands of engineers). Today, same change requires updating one central codebase (AmazonUI), by one team. Front-end innovations are much faster, much easier. During this talk, we will look at the inception and adoption of Amazon's Front-end platform — AmazonUI (AUI), lessons learned and how FE engineering culture has changed. We will also demo a tech deep dive on marrying computer science algorithms and FE engineering to create smooth customer experience in FireTV.

3:00

Design for Non-Designers

Tracy Osborn

Not everyone can hire a professional designer for their websites and web apps, but we all still want our interfaces to be easy to use and attractive. However, if you want to learn a bit of design, design books jump straight into concepts like “the golden ratio” and teach proper typographic terms which, to be frank, aren't needed if you're just looking to improve your website's look and feel.

This talk will cover the top quick ways to improve your website, covering both user experience as well as visual design. Quick hits, easy to understand and utilize principles that anyone can use to improve their design skills. Perhaps you too can become the next designer+developer unicorn!

Observable Web

Ganesh Shanmugasundaram

We've been dealing (or fiddling) with async events with callbacks and promises, but can we do better? Why can't we write our solutions the way we think about it, in a step by step fashion? Come in to explore what's the future looking like for async programming.

4:00

Supercharged Hybrid Apps: Web Components + JS Interface

Chris Tserng

Have you ever wanted to design an app that had both native components and web components but weren't sure how to start? This talk discusses a design pattern using web components and Android's JavascriptInterface that allows you to supercharge your hybrid app. It allows you to easily interface with native code using custom elements, attributes and events rather than having to design a custom JS API. Furthermore, this design allows features to be easily extended and ported to other applications. Learn first hand how to implement this design as well as see how this design was used to extend functionality on Amazon WebView on FireOS.

Simply accessible web performance

Estelle Weyl

By developing with web standards, you can create accessible, performant web sites. Semantic markup helps ensure accessibility while reducing the need for frameworks. Write semantic HTML and leverage CSS Selectors and the cascade, to reduce your CSS and JS by up to 95% and obliterate your queue of accessibility bugs.

5:00

Development experience with React Native

Alex Kotliarskyi

Find out why React Native was built, the motivation and the vision. Learn how using React and React Native influences JS language, libraries and code, way of thinking and even organizations structure. We'll follow that up with a demo of tools used to create React Native apps – CLI, Nuclide, Flow support, reloading, debugging, inspecting views, and performance tools.

“To Be Decided…”

Patrick Beer

In 10 years, we are going to use the web in a very different way than today. We will search or shop differently in a world without browsers but permanent, personal internet connection. How can we make sure that we as Web Developers don't disrupt JavaScript and ourselves?

All you need to register is your legal id. Please ensure your name in Eventbrite matches your legal id, otherwise we may not be able to let you in. To change your registered name, please log into Eventbrite and edit your ticket.

Off-site visitor parking options

Off-site parking garages, surface lots, and on-street parking are available on a first come, first served basis. Off-site parking is most readily available before 9am. Off-site parking cannot be validated. In addition to the nearby visitor parking options below, please see Parkopedia.com and the SDOT Parking Map for more options.

Garages

Yes! We'll be handing out lunch vouchers when you register which you can use at restaurants in the building. Please be advised that you're responsible for any expenses that exceed the voucher's value.

Conference Code of Conduct

All attendees, speakers, sponsors and volunteers at our conference are required to agree with the following code of conduct. Organisers will enforce this code throughout the event. We expect cooperation from all participants to help ensure a safe environment for everybody.

Need Help?

If you have any questions, comments, concerns, or to report anything that makes you feel uncomfortable or unsafe, you can use these channels:

Email: webdevcon@amazon.com

In person: Any organizer, identified by STAFF badges or shirts for WebDevCon.

Campus Security: Security staff is located at entrances, elevators, and stairwells inside the conference center.

The Quick Version

Our conference is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks, workshops, parties, Twitter and other online media. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference without a refund at the discretion of the conference organisers.

Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

Sponsors are also subject to the anti-harassment policy. In particular, sponsors should not use sexualised images, activities, or other material. Booth staff (including volunteers) should not use sexualised clothing/uniforms/costumes, or otherwise create a sexualised environment.

If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the conference organisers may take any action they deem appropriate, including warning the offender or expulsion from the conference with no refund.

If you are being harassed, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact a member of conference staff immediately. Conference staff can be identified as they'll be wearing branded t-shirts.

Conference staff will be happy to help participants contact hotel/venue security or local law enforcement, provide escorts, or otherwise assist those experiencing harassment to feel safe for the duration of the conference. We value your attendance.

We expect participants to follow these rules at conference and workshop venues and conference-related social events.